


Shark Fin Blues

by nigeltde



Category: Supernatural
Genre: First Time, M/M, Season 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-31
Updated: 2017-03-31
Packaged: 2018-10-13 06:18:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10508010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nigeltde/pseuds/nigeltde
Summary: A lie agreed upon.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Season three obsesses me. Title stolen from The Drones; summary from David Milch. Many thanks once again to [Wetsammywinchester.](http://archiveofourown.org/users/WetSammyWinchester/pseuds/WetSammyWinchester)

He suspects, Sam can tell. Suspects Sam of collecting clues and lore and secrets like shells, hoarding them, and he's right, but he lets Sam pretend, while he thinks it's harmless; he has tried to maintain Sam's fantasies since they were children. They function in these easy daylight lies, prolonging their existence through the summer.

In Portland Sam pockets a book from the shelf of a desiccated classics professor. In Carlsbad he fires coati bones, and his sweat and blood drips into the dust. In Moss Point he is dipped in the river and taught to say please.

Nothing works.

The leaves change colour.

Dean is dying.

Sure as a lurking tumour, sure as a hole in the heart. He will be collected. Sam cannot get past it, his brain stuttering, his imagination failing. Twice before he has walked the edge of this chasm. It still feels like the end of time. His brother, gone. His brother, who curls his lip over burned truckstop coffee but drinks it anyway, who fucks girls like it's a trip to the county fair, who pats his car goodbye every time he steps more than a foot away.

They move across the land like a plague, crawling through windows, dogging the steps of every creature that catches their eye. They max someone else's credit cards on jagged-edge sport tyres that Dean refuses to steal outright. They drink too much beer and they learn too much about demons, and Sam watches his brother die again and again.

Sam holds these moments too tight, overflowing his clenched fists like sand, and picks at what remains until he can't tell if it's misery he's feeling or love. Dean's skin glowing in the winter sun and his freckles fading for the last time. His flashing white teeth and fists rolling in the air and his oft-repeated trivia (Sam, these drums, Sammy, listen, goddamn, listen, they were recorded in a stairwell) when Zeppelin burns out the car's speakers. Sam's heart crackles and keens too, pushed beyond its physical limits.

Christmas night, loaded up on eggnog, Sam sleeps better than he has in months, dreaming of Dean collapsed into the bed behind him, warm and everlasting. He wakes reluctantly into the cold seeping through the motel curtains, and sits, his body creaking and crying like a mourner. He puts his head in his hands to stop the shaking.

Day at a time, Sam, Dean says, brief hand on his shoulder, and moves past to the bathroom. His scent, stale and familiar, lingers; the pressure of his fingers remakes Sam into something incapable, puts him on his last legs, brittle as a snake skull.

They are pretending he's not already dead. They are pretending Sam has a plan. They pretend a lot of things.

It used to be that Sam believed he had kept it separate, that it had no bearing on the rest of their days. But Dean knows about his research; he knows about this other thing, surely. He must know, impossible to really believe that Sam could have kept it hidden through the weedy tangle of their lives, stretching back and back to the start. Impossible to be in this life with Dean and not reveal himself, the heavy drag in his chest, the fits and starts at casual touches. The caught gaze as Dean drives, eats, fights, wakes, laughs. An inattentive dullard could not hope to miss it and Dean is far from dull, and Sam is well aware of the razor-sharp lase of his attention, one of the few impeccable constancies Sam has.

So Dean surely knows, and forgives Sam his transgressions enough to let Sam believe it buried. It's a soft generosity in his bellicose pugilist brother that only Sam in all the world is gifted to see. Only Sam in all the world will miss him, truly. He suffocates in gratitude as Dean every time says nothing and lets Sam continue on his own terms; maybe the greatest kindness Dean has ever shown him, allowing this fiction, this other Sam who has not been burning since he was fifteen, who loves his brother sensibly and proudly, who has the potential for something better, something domestic and fine. It has taken Sam many years and a death or two but he has realised, recently, with a puzzler's relief, and a worshipper's dread, that he has been decided. For good or bad, peace or blood, his path is set and without deviation.

And swift at the heels of this realisation: calamity. Dean's own true road traded away to a red-eyed bitch for a shambles, for Sam's ruin of a soul. For a life that, brotherless, is barely worth the name, a fact clear and clearer to him each day as he wakes to the ongoing internal lament, another five hours gone. Ticking down, ticking down, every second critical, every second necessary, and so Sam is distraught, heartbroken, when Dean finishes sleeping through every barmaid and librarian in the Midwest, strikes out with the girl tapping her nails on the cigarette machine and turns to him one ordinary motel night, drunker than Sam would have thought possible and with terrifying intent, laying a hot palm on Sam's waist, eyes in shadow.

Sam, he says, black cracked slur, and Sam, appalled, pushes him away, into his own bed, and spends the rest of the night rotten with shame and furious, twisting curses into his bedsheets at the audacity – the sheer impudence – how caustic and cruel to take their lies away from Sam in the service of some tiny banal satisfaction, to turn Sam into one of Dean's well-used and ill-remembered women.

Dean wastes the morning nursing his head and Sam stirs creamer into two coffees and feels his fury dissolve into hurt and an ominous sense of loss, another forced rehearsal for the greater one to come. He remembers, as he usually tries not to, sharing a year ago a queen bed when Dean had, asleep, slipped a heavy hand under Sam's shirt to rest on his belly. Near dawn Dean rolled away, four hours of a hot dark secret, an erection that swelled and faded and swelled painfully again, that pinballed Sam away from his brother for weeks afterward. Tense and awkward ricochets out from under a friendly arm across the shoulder or a knee knocking beneath a diner table, cleaving to the Impala's passenger door, always searching for something foreign worth looking at and trying to resist the well-worn tracks his eyes take across Dean's cheekbones, the bend of his lips, the tender place where his jaw turned into his throat.

That same woeful fear presses now in his chest, that same clutch and cramp in his gut: long lonely weeks stretching out ahead if he is lucky, white shaking abandonment if not; if Dean is, predictably, angry at Sam for denying Dean some part of himself.

But Dean never really seems to recover from his hangover, or never really sobers up, frightening red-rimmed eyes and wild recklessness that sends him into dive bars and after werewolves when Sam's not looking, ugly echoes of the times after Dad's death. He tells Sam to his face that he wants to live and belies it immediately, forcing him to follow, to intervene when pool hustles go wrong and ifrits decloak in the fire marshal's basement, denying Sam space, a chance to hold himself aloof in recovery. For a full week every night he picks Dean up off of tile and gravel and washes his blood away and puts him to bed and still Dean says nothing, leans his weight with his fingers hooking into the bone-grooves of Sam's shoulder until Sam thinks with growing horror that he must have it turned around. Perhaps on that night Dean was not out for a transient fuck but was in fact giving in, giving up what Sam had never meant to ask for, the last thing Dean can give before he goes.

He had needed to be so drunk.

For some hidden span of time Dean has been musing on it, and now, with bare months left, the dead end lurching into sight, he has reached a decision and that decision is to bleed himself out again for Sam, to wrap himself like a party favour and wait for Sam to cheer.

Sam refuses to cheer. He refuses to talk about it. He refuses to look and his hands become shades of themselves, uncaring and clinical, pouring his dear departing brother into bed. It makes him so angry. They are missing it, their last chances, eyes askew, not even fighting as a way to be close and their hunts turn into skin-of-teeth affairs, silent and perilous and always hinging on love loved wrong. Everything Sam sees becomes a comment on his failures. They remeet amateur hunters and Sam baffles at their certainties. One of them dies, and still they don't learn that their fictions are too real to bear.

Spring begins to happen. Sam wakes earlier every day and jogs ten miles return down the closest road out of every town. Snow turns into frost. The whitetails he surprises start to show russet along the spine, readying for the sun, for life.

Dean doesn't ask again. They have two months left.

If Sam were still a praying man, he might pray for release.

::

They take a case that draws them further north, deep into the fog, into blackberry and hemlock forests because children are going missing and if there's anything Dean can't stand it's a kid's face stapled to a utility pole. He is clawing his way out of the booze haze, finally, like maybe he'd told the truth when he said he didn't want to die.

Sam views the case as a favour to his slowly resurgent brother. He has a lead on a coven in Manchester that flares in his mind like a beacon; a poor lead destined to be disappointing, but if someone asked him if he cared to devote their time to the children, he doesn't know if he'd have an acceptable answer. Children have everyone to look out for them. He only has Dean.

He has, silently, allocated forty-eight hours to this, and most of it has been taken up with the hike. The sun is weak, besieged by trees. Their boots are getting wet, and he's sweating through his undershirt. Dean is twirling a machete in the disappointed hope that there will be vines or curling ferns at least to lop. Ahead there is a cave in which they expect to find bones and or something to kill.

Instead they find a woman who, frowning, forgives them. Her hair looks like the radials on a Renaissance halo. Her feet are made of moss. She wears a marten pelt like a sash, between her breasts. She is not really a woman. She might be Life, who Sam has called to year on year and more lately, and he steps in front of his brother and breathes a deep verdant breath to plead on his behalf.

Lay down your burden child, she says to him, and he turns and they fall, Dean's arms a circle, his mouth a brand on Sam's cheek. Sam presses his thumbs to the hollows of his brother's hipbones; the dips of his temples; his eyebrows. Dean's eyes are clear and true. He blinks a stunning smile up at Sam and a very serious joy kicks Sam's heart clean into the sky.

He says the only word that means anything and Dean takes it kindly from his lips, cradling the back of Sam's head, a soft tangling kiss, their mouths the same, their bodies. Their jackets and shirts become a bed that the dirt damp seeps through under pressure of their weight, bright and cold in the air. Goosebumps run in waves across Dean's skin, wherever Sam brushes his fingers. The sun still can't see them.

They are a secret, and hiding together. Sam has his brother naked and wanting under him, and all they need to do is move against each other, press with their hips and hook with their legs, generate heat, pant, easy and hot. Sam sucks and bites at his collarbone and tastes dirt and sweat and the rumble of his groan when Sam takes him in hand.

Dean rolls him and they crush virgin seedlings and Sam surges up, digs fingers into the flesh of his ass and lets his desire do the work, lets himself writhe under his brother's care. Dean sets his forehead against Sam's chin so he can stare down between them, and the noise he makes when Sam comes bottoms Sam out, wrings him dry, stars bursting in his vision and his limbs seizing tight, clutching around Dean. The drag of their skin stings, luxurious. Dean moans against his throat and ruts and shoots a hot brand across Sam's belly. Every part of Sam is alive and made for good.

They drown in the washing peace; the pads of her fingers trace his hairline like ice. Dean grunts at her to fuck off and she does, but Sam can feel her feeding from them anyway. He turns his face into Dean's neck and tries not to think how he and his brother always become fodder, in the end.

On their return to town there is a mob outside the sheriff's station, poster-boards with gap-toothed faces, and a man, only human, blood in his eye, being jerked through the doors.

Dean beside him still has leaves in his hair, and seven weeks to live.

::

Dean wants to see the shrimp boats go out. They head south into a dogwood winter, a last desperate cold snap. Nothing lets go.

Dean makes him drive, arm stretched along the seat, fingers dipped beneath Sam's collar. He kisses Sam in a gas station bathroom, filthy and commanding, until Sam's lungs are empty and his dick is full and desperate, and then sinks to his knees. Sam topples back into the door, precarious under Dean's tongue, his eagerness, and closes his eyes to sharpen the feeling into a cruelty that leaves scars, a trace.

The boats go out, and come back, full and squirming. They eat red jambalaya in the car as the sun goes down, windows open to let in the salt, and Dean licks Sam's fingers clean. It tears Sam in two. He has a meet with a priestess at moonset and a brother saying his name in the backseat, shucking his jacket, dirty grin on his mouth and a budding hope in his eyes that has nothing to do with the future.

They've started something new, that they have no time for.

A demon continues to tell Sam that she can save his brother. Sam continues to tell himself the same. He talks to Bobby every other day, and between them they divide duties: Bobby the Latin and Aramaic, the myths and contract law, and Sam the beings, holy and un-, or a way to turn advantage. It's not fair, he thinks, consumingly, whenever he drinks, it's not fair that they don't get to _be_ , together; such a lancing and pointless truth that he tries not to drink too often. 

The more time he loses the more he wants the solution to be slaughter instead of cleverness. His brain turns towards blood. He hangs up the phone and looks with a bitter suspicious eye at his brother staring blankfaced out the window and thinks he sees victory there, Dean's very last victory over him, Sam's life tied up too neat in a deal he never got to witness.

They talk more than they have in months, and say about the same amount, the same things over and over with clockwork regularity. At night Sam will touch his brother's dick and say don't go, don't leave, and Dean will chant okay okay like a nursery rhyme, drag his lips across Sam's cheek until they are kissing again.

Did you ever think of this before? Sam asks.

No, Dean whispers, but the reverent way he spreads Sam's legs and buries his face between them says _without end_. Sam arches and gasps, beyond language, and later trails his fingers through their mingling sweat and tallies it with the rest of their regrets.

Chances come and go, and deathtrap time-rotting leads, and women who never made it to ally and never made it to friend. Dean stops drinking and starts again. Sam gives serious thought to Frankensteinian immortality and tells Dean that happily, without care, and watches the colour run from Dean's face.

I've got you, Sam murmurs into the seat of his brother's ribs, his armpit, the crease where his thigh joins his hip. He strokes Dean's flank and feels him shiver. I'll find a way, I'm close.

Dean nudges the head of his dick against Sam's lips, releases his breath in a shuddering sigh. 

I know Sammy. He twines Sam's hair, knots tight enough that strands remain as dark bands ringing his fingers white after he comes and Sam pulls away, jaw aching and never enough, never anything that lasts.

An alert hits his inbox, some tome entered into an Antiquarian catalogue. The seller is in Chicago. They have just arrived in Thoreau, half a day away from the Grand Canyon.

Tell Bobby to get it, says Dean, sitting bent over on their dancing cactus sheets, testing his strength, his ability to stand. His thighs are still trembling from the angle Sam held them at to fuck him face to face, punching high ecstatic whimpers out of Dean, sounds he'd never thought his brother could make, his whole being given over to Sam.

Bobby's busy on another thing, Sam says, wiping himself down, still trying to find his heartbeat, and then, five hours later, with nothing but loamy pregnant farmland to glue his gaze to: I'm nothing without you.

He hears Dean's throat click as he swallows. His voice is too deep. You're plenty Sam. You're the only one who had a hope of getting out of this.

Sam abandons the world and careens across, grabs at Dean until he bumps them off the highway, the shoulder at an angle that tips him further into his brother, unbalanced and top-heavy, the seat leather squeaking as Dean knocks his head back against the window and Sam tears into his jeans, pulls the blood into his brother's dick and swallows him deep, Dean's knees bracketing his shoulders, his breath harsh and loud filling the car.

A strong band of sun warms a strip of Sam's back. He wipes his mouth, working the taste into his skin, and sits up, lets Dean play with him, stroke him slow and maddening, fondle the skin of his balls, massage the muscles of his chest, until Sam gets beaten down by pleasure.

I'm gonna get you out of it, he says, sore. Dean's eyes are downcast, to where his hands are working, his lashes long against his cheeks still flushed red. Sam leans back to give him more room, braces himself weakly on the dash. I'm gonna save you.

Okay, okay.

You're not going anywhere.

Dean scoots down to kiss him at the base of his dick, making Sam cry out.

I'm not going anywhere.

In half an hour the engine guns again and Sam thinks of the ground outside a cave in the deeps of Vermont and wonders if a tree will grow there, broad and green and magnificent, a testament to the ferocious beauty of his brother and the power of what Sam feels for him, ancient and ageless.

It is certain that Sam will not live to see it.

A week. Sam can't sleep. He reads in bed and lets Dean to watch him for an hour, until his eyes close and he slips away. In the morning Sam rises feverous with new names and possibilities blazing in his head and Dean tries to tug him back down, says hey, hey, I had a dream, let me show you.

Sam shakes his head and pulls away, bones of his hand stretching as Dean clings to the tips of his fingers.

I can't now, Dean, after, show me after.

I know, Dean says, and smiles, small and quiet in the pure rose dawn, but let me, you'll like it.

Rain check, Sam says, and splinters, like his shadow has decided to take its haughty leave of him, fracturing deep inside, his brain disappearing into impossibility.

Yeah Sammy, yeah, after, Dean says, and lets him go, and lies back down. Sure thing.

:: 

The end. 

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback/concrit welcome.
> 
>  
> 
> [Rebloggable tumblr link for those so inclined.](http://nigeltde-fic.tumblr.com/post/159057965916/shark-fin-blues-3444-words-by-nigeltde-chapters)


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